Autumn light Season of fire and farewells

Review by New York Times Review

THE ATTRACTION of Anglo-American writers to Japan as the source of an alternate way of being is a long story, going back to the 19 th century (Lafcadio Hearn), through that wonderful set of mid-20thcentury translators and critics (Donald Keene, Donald Richie, Edward Seidensticker, Ivan Morris), down to a recent sowing-of-wild-oats memoir by Ian Buruma. Pico Iyer - globe-trotting journalist, memoirist and travel writer extraordinaire - first became enamored with Japan when he was 26. Born in England to Indian parents who later moved to Santa Barbara, Calif., he attended graduate school at Oxford and Harvard and then went to work for Time magazine. On a Tokyo stopover while returning from a trip to Hong Kong, he was enchanted to find "a world suddenly intimate and human-scaled. ... By the time I boarded my plane in early afternoon, I'd decided to leave my comfortableseeming job in New York City and move to Japan." He fell in love with a Japanese woman, Hiroko, who left her husband and moved with her two small children and the author into a tiny apartment. In Japan, he notes, people accommodate themselves to small spaces, and so he and Hiroko have for a quarter-century. The transposition from a bustling office tower in Manhattan to a suburb of "the sleepy old city" of Nara has felt to him "as if I've walked out of a cluttered warehouse into a simple bare room with a scroll on the wall, everything so singular that emotion is brought to a pitch." All this is part of what Iyer sees as an aesthetic of enhancement through subtraction, "the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain." The book attempts a similar paring down, composed as it is of brief ruminations, notations, vignettes, descriptions. What holds everything together, besides Iyer's elegantly smooth prose style and gift for detailed observation, is a circling around the theme of autumn in Japan and this autumnal period in his life. Self-described as having a restless "'birdlike' traveler's temperament," he spends half the year tending to his aging mother in California or reporting on subjects like "the warlords of Mogadishu," but tries to get back to Japan each fall. This season teaches him the lesson of impermanence, the inevitability of decay, and "how to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying." Not much plot to speak of here: We watch Iyer going through his daily rounds, dropping in on his Ping-Pong club, visiting his mother-in-law in her nursing home, recalling scenes from the past. His wife, questioning him apprehensively, says, "Like Ozu movie? ... Your book, nothing happening?" "Not exactly nothing," he replies. "It's in the spaces where nothing is happening that one has to make a life." And indeed, he references Ozu films numerous times, particularly the way that cinematic master will cycle through the seasons as a metaphor for the changelessness of the nonhuman world within stories of human change and suffering. Of course, it's harder to pull off on the page, without sublime actors like Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara to embody the effect. Iyer's wife makes for a marvelous presence, zooming away on her motorbike to her job in a boutique, cleaning the house briskly like a tornado or dashing off to honor dead ancestors at shrines and grave sites. Hiroko is the book's motor, and Iyer is in awe of her energy, even as he says, a bit condescendingly: "It's one of the qualities I most admire in her: She doesn't stop to think" and "I have a wife who reminds me with every gesture that the only impulses to trust are the ones that arise without thought." Hiroko strikes me as more quickwitted than thoughtless, but perhaps Iyer is aspiring, on her behalf, to the Buddhist ideal of the blank mind. His own self-portrait is dimmer. He comes across as a modest, kind, gentle man, somewhat colorless, as though trying to practice spiritual erasure of the ego. He had moved to Japan "to learn how best to dissolve a sense of self within something larger and less temporary" - an admirable pursuit, though problematic for autobiographical writers. He admits he finds "belief" in general difficult, and says he doesn't consider himself a Buddhist, but treats with fascinated respect his wife's conviction that spirits and ghosts exist. He's a big proponent of his own ignorance, saying he doesn't choose to learn more than a smattering of Japanese because he needs mystery and "a sense of open space in life, something to offset the sense of the familiar." In a way, his attraction to Japan can be seen as an attempt to hold onto its exotic, eternal appeal - to his partly idealized picture of what the East has to offer a Western man in the way of healing. "Autumn Light" isn't the book to turn to for an account of the political, social and economic problems of today's Japan. Now in his 60s, Iyer feels free to communicate his tentative revelations about life. There's much wisdom in what he says, though some of it comes close to platitude. But then, perhaps it's the nature of hard-earned wisdom to sound like something we've heard many times before. 'How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.' PHILLIP LOPATE, a professor at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of "A Mother's Tale" and "To Show and to Tell."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 23, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

In The Art of Stillness (2014), Iyer urged readers to find contentment by slowing down. This wisdom is reflected in the beloved travel writer and journalist's wistful and conscious memoir filled with musings about home, culture, family, and death. After the passing of his father-in-law, Iyer leaves his second home in California for Japan to comfort his wife, Hiroko. Returning to his two-room apartment in a Eurocentric neighborhood outside Kyoto, Iyer sees the familiar land of serenity and superstition as though through new eyes. He marvels at the mystical rituals his wife practices to ensure a happy afterlife for her father and explores why Hiroko's intellectual brother cut ties with the family. He recounts his daughter's battle with Hodgkin's disease and makes his case that Japan's reddening maple leaves are more iconic than the cherry blossoms. As in his previous work, the British-born Indian American also examines the role of the globalist. The funniest and most illuminating thread traces Iyer's blossoming ping-pong skills, as he competes against spry septuagenarians and witnesses the more passionate side of traditionally stoical Japanese men. With his trademark blend of amiability, lighthearted humor, and profound observations, Iyer celebrates emotional connection and personal expression, and he upholds death as an affirmation of life and all its seasons.--Jonathan Fullmer Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Aging, death, and family fracturing are seen through the lens of Japanese culture in this luminous memoir. Iyer (The Lady and the Monk), a British-Indian-American novelist and Time journalist who lives in Japan with his Japanese wife, Hiroko, recounts their efforts to cope with her father's death, her mother's entry into a nursing home, and her estrangement from her brother. He revisits Hiroko's family stories, explores Japan's mourning rituals as she tends relatives' graves and offers cups of tea to her father's spirit, and probes the feelings of guilt and betrayal-especially when her mother wants to live in their home-that rites can't assuage. Iyer weaves in sharp observations of a graying Japan, particularly of the vigorous but gradually faltering oldsters in his ping-pong club, and visits to the Dalai Lama, a family friend, who dispenses brisk wisdom on life's impermanence ("Only body gone," the Dalai Lama says reflecting on death. "Spirit still there"). The book is partly a love letter to the vibrant Hiroko, whose clipped English-"I have only one speed. Always fastball. But my brother not so straight. Only curveball"-unfolds like haiku, and it's partly an homage to the Japanese culture of delicate manners, self-restraint, and acceptance that "sadness lasts longer than mere pleasure." The result is an engrossing narrative, a moving meditation on loss, and an evocative, lyrical portrait of Japanese society. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The acclaimed travel writer and journalist meditates on the impermanence of life.Like many others, Iyer (The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, 2014, etc.) reveres the beauty and portent of autumn. Japan, he writes, wants the world to think of it as the land of cherry blossoms, "but it's the reddening of the maple leaves under a blaze of ceramic-blue skies that is the place's secret heart." Iyerwho divides his time between California, where he cares for his mother, and Japan with his wife, Hiroko, and her two adult children from a previous marriagewrites that autumn "poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying." The author chronicles how Hiroko's nonagenarian father had recently died. Her mother, whose memory was failing, complained, "I have two childrenand I have to live in a nursing home. Until I die." The second child is Masahiro, who severed all contact with his family. Throughout the narrative, the author mixes musings on the ephemerality of existence with scenes of quotidian life, most notably his visits to the local ping-pong club for "maverick games on Saturday afternoons" with elderly club patrons with vivid memories of the war. Some readers may be put off by Iyer's decision to render Hiroko's English dialogue in fragmentse.g., "you remember last week, I go parent house little check my father thing?" Late in the book, he refers to her "homemade, ideogrammatic English," but the rendering will still strike some as insensitive. Otherwise, this is a thoughtful work with many poignant moments, as when Iyer and Hiroko take her mother on a drive past Kyoto's temples and, in a moment of clarity, she starts crying when she remembers visiting them with her husband."Bright though they are in color, blossoms fall," Iyer hears schoolchildren singing. "Which of us escapes the world of change?" This moving work reinforces the importance of finding beauty before disaster strikes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Excerpted from Autumn Light Now, as we head out into the sunshine--the northern hills of Kyoto are a blaze of russet, burnt umber, orange, under late-autumn skies of depthless blue--we're ushered into a backstage room of sorts, before an afternoon conversation between the Dalai Lama and a celebrated novelist. There are only four of us in the space: the Dalai Lama, Hiroko and myself, and a Californian monk from the Dalai Lama's temple who's also in our small traveling party. "So," says the Tibetan, "what is the point of art? What is the larger purpose?" Startled, I cite the Sixth Dalai Lama, famous for his poems and songs. The Dalai Lama doesn't look very interested. The monk mentions Milarepa, the mystic who composed poems in a cave. The Dalai Lama looks dissatisfied. In his way of thinking, looking closely at reality is the only thing that matters, not all the ways we make embroidered designs around it. I recall the November day two years ago when all of us traveled up with him to a fishing village north of Tokyo laid waste by the tsunami of eight months earlier. A few miles out of the city of Sendai, we began passing along clean, modern roads lined by nothing but compacted trash, block-long rectangles of smashed cars and refuse. Telephone poles listed at forty-five-degree angles; a solitary chair sat in the open skeleton of what had once been a living room. Buses bobbed on the water beside us. When we pulled up at Ishinomaki--hundreds had gathered along the road there, behind ropes, to greet the famous visitor--it was to see nothing but a flattened landscape, which looked like pictures I'd seen of Hiroshima after the atom bomb. More than three thousand had lost their lives in this village alone, many of them children; nineteen thou- sand had lost their homes. The Dalai Lama stepped out of his car and strode without hesitation to the people, mostly women, who had assembled in the street to see him. Many were sobbing, or calling out, in limited English, "Thank you, thank you." He held one person's head against his chest; he blessed another. He touched heads, shook hands, looked deep into one set of eyes, then another, asking, "What do you feel? . . . Are you still sad?" "Please, be brave," he told them, as the women sobbed and others pushed forwards. "Please, change your hearts. You cannot change what has happened. Please help everyone else, help others become okay." The crowd fell quiet; some of its members nodded. "Too many people died," he went on. "If you worry, it cannot help them. Please, work hard. That is the best offering you can make to the ones you lost. Rebuild your community as your country rebuilt itself after the war." It's the kind of advice that anyone might give, perhaps, but when he turned around, to walk towards the temple that had survived, gravestones in the foreground tilted crazily over or knocked down entirely, I saw the Dalai Lama take off his glasses and wipe away a tear himself. Suffering is the central fact of life, from his Buddhist viewpoint; it's what we do with it that defines our lives. Now, as he gathers his robes o stage, peering down to see how the theater's sound system works, I think of how, when we went into the temple in Ishinomaki, it was to see the bones of the lost, tidily gathered and placed in brightly colored boxes by the altar, under framed photographs, maybe fifty of them in all; in every case, Hiroko explained, there was no survivor to claim the remains, as Japanese custom decrees. "All lose parent," she told me of the five-year-old boys lined up cheerfully in uniform to shake the Dalai Lama's hand in the autumn sun. After taking his place in front of the altar, the Dalai Lama began to speak, recalling the afternoon he had been told, at the age of twenty-three, that he had to leave his home, as well as his homeland, that very evening, if both of them were not to be destroyed. No time to say goodbye to his friends, no chance to take his small dog. Two days later, as he was crossing the Himalayas towards exile, a new life, he heard that many of his friends were dead. At the end of today's session, we return with the Dalai Lama and his bodyguards and monks and secretaries to his hotel, hasten up in the elevator to the top floor and walk at high speed down the corridor with him to his room. His eyes are often red after a long day of events, but his pace never slackens. He's holding Hiroko's hand as he moves forwards; as in a physical expression of his teachings, he reflexively reaches for any set of hands to grasp between his own as he strides along. Just before we arrive at his door, Hiroko says, "Your Holiness, we must leave you now. But thank you for everything." He's on his way to Tokyo next day; we have obligations at home. "Also," she says--her voice falters just a little--"I want to tell you: my father passed away this year." Instantly the fast-stepping monk stops. He looks at her directly, deep into her eyes. "When?"
 "This year."
 "What cause?"
 "No cause. He was old. His body was tired."
 He steps forwards and holds her for a long, long time. Then he steps back and looks searchingly at her. "Remember: Only body gone. Spirit still there. Only cover gone." He heads into his room and, at the threshold, turns around to wave at us briskly. "Good night, thank you." And then is gone as we head back into the golden flares of late afternoon. Excerpted from Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells by Pico Iyer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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